If you cut a banana into slices, you'll see that it has three distinct sections, an apple has five, no matter what kind of flower you're looking at, chances are, it has three, five, eight, 13, or 21 petals. But the easiest place to find these numbers in nature isn't in bunnies, it's in plants.

If you put one boy bunny and one girl bunny together, that's two, and those two together will make a third, and those three, when they're done, you know, taking turns, will make five, et cetera. The sequence was first described by mathematicians in India about 1300 years ago, and it was introduced to the west in 1202 by Leonardo of Pisa, aka Fibonacci, who was also responsible for introducing Arabic numerals to Europe, which, yeah, if he hadn't done that, we'd still be counting in Roman numerals, which would be terrible.įibonacci was a mathematician, and in his book, Liber Abaci, he described this sequence with a thought-experiment about a family of incestuous bunnies. You may know this pattern, the first and the second add up to the third, and the second and the third add up to the fourth, and the fourth and the fifth add up to the sixth and so on. Together, they're called the Fibonacci sequence and it goes something like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55. In fact, there are specific numbers that we see in nature all the time. Hank Green: Math wasn't made up to harass English majors, it was invented by a little something called nature, and it's everywhere you look.

Nature fibonacci sequence